Research Description:

Few things are as fascinating, or as important, in people's lives as language. Language
plays a central role in almost all aspects of our lives. And psycholinguistics involves
the psychological study of language. In my laboratory, we examine the cognitive processes
that are involved in using and understanding language. More specifically, we examine
the processes involved in understanding written language. Because language almost
always involves units of language larger than an individual word or a single sentence,
we focus on how people understand connected discourse, such as stories. In this work,
we ask questions such as: What is the nature of the "memory representation" that readers
create? That is, after reading a story (or an email or an essay) what information
does the reader have stored in memory? And what are the cognitive processes involved
in comprehension? In addition to contributing toward a theory of discourse, or text,
processing, this work contributes to the study of a variety of basic cognitive processes
such as memory and attention.

Some recent topics of investigation in my lab: How skilled are readers at keeping
track of story characters' perspective? What types of inferences do readers draw?
How do readers represent the spatial information in stories? How does a change in
context influence readers' memory for a story?